Question: How often should I post on my blog?

All of you, by now might have a good understanding of what a blog really is. As you now know that, you also must be aware that blogging, unlike a website, is an activity which needs the blogger to be actively engaged in regularly updating the blog, creating rich and engaging content to keep the flow of visitors steady to the blog. We all need to understand that there are hundreds of thousands of blogs out there and a lot of them concentrate of similar kinds of contents, which means that a blog which is being updated regularly, features engaging contents, and posts which are superior than the lot will eventually succeed in getting the visitors, who will gradually turn into regular visitors of your blog, which plays a pivotal role in making your blog successful over time. Now to achieve the success every blogger wants, it is crucial that you plan a couple of things carefully. As you know, content is the king. It is the content that brings in visitors to blogs. Now since you have decided the contents of your blog, since you have reached this far, looking up for posting frequency for your blog, it is important that we concentrate on other things that are crucial for a successful blog. You have got to have a great template for your blog. The template is nothing but the design of your blog. Layouts, colour schemes, typefaces (fonts), functionalities of the blog. You can do a great number of changes to your blog templates once you choose a base template, and you have decided upon the changes you want to make in your blog. We have already discussed previously how to make changes to blog templates using the template editor, and even directly from the Template HTML Editor, for blogger. Once you are satisfied with the changes you wanted to make to the blog’s template, and you have successfully implemented all the changes you wanted, you can concentrate upon other things.

With that, we come to another important aspect of a successful blog, which is consistency in posting. This is an important aspect that has the ability to make or break a blog’s success. We thus decided to do a post discussing what should be the posting frequency for your blog. The blogosphere is full of blogs that have just a single post, or a couple more than that. The contents dealt with in blogs is just extra ordinary. It’s just awesome to take a look at what all things bloggers can come up, and it’s just extraordinary when you get to read through these different kinds of topics people around the world blog about. Now just imagine, where your blog stands in the crowd of so many blogs over the internet. Now on a blog, when a visitor knows the kind of “website” he or she is visiting, the visitor expects a certain amount of regularity in the posting. Try placing yourself in place of a regular internet user looking for information on some topic, and through your search, you reach a blog which has the topic you were looking for. Now the information you were looking on the topic was spot on. The writeup was excellent, and you liked the writeup in the blogpost, a lot. You decided to look for more blogposts on the blog, only to find that the last blogpost was made in October, last year, and it has been a good six months since the blog was last updated. What would be the impression on you? Irrespective of the kind of expertise the said blogger had on a certain topic or topics, you find it worthless checking out the blog again, since you know that the blogger might have lost interest in the blog, or might have just dumped the blog.

This is what consistency does. No matter how much expertise you hold in a particular genre, if you are not consistent, it is useless to put in a lot of effort in your blog, since you might not get the kind of visitor response you might be expecting. Now, in blogging, the inflow of visitors has a direct relation with the motivation level of the blogger, more importantly when the one behind the blog is an individual. So, lets now head over straight to the question. What should be my posting frequency? Well, answering this question is a bit complicated. Before answering a question like this, one has to keep in consideration, the kind of niche you have chosen for your blog. The level of experience you have in blogging, the kind of popularity you already enjoy in the particular niche, and lastly, the amount of time you have to spare for your blog. If your blog is a particular source which you want to convert into a consistent source of income, you’d better spare more time blogging, and churn out posts/updates more regularly than the blogger who is not doing this for a livelihood. The niche you are blogging into also decides the optimum frequency of posting on your blog. Like if you are blogging about computing, smartphones and IT related gadgets, a much sought after niche, with a majority of internet search targeted on these, you better be prepared to blog as often as one blogpost per day, or even more, which will mean that you will need to invest more time in researching the topics, writing professional quality articles and posting them on your blog. But then, this posting frequency too is related to the kind of exposure your blog has in the blogosphere. Like, if your blog is relatively new with not much exposure in the blogosphere, or the kind of niche you are blogging into, you should try restricting the number of posts in your blogs, to a level that you think will be good. The fact worth considering here is that since your blog is relatively new, there might not be a lot of readers for your blog which will mean that your efforts will go waste since there won’t be a great reader base for your kind of contents on your blog. Building a good reader base needs time, and you need to keep that into consideration. So, initially, you should try investing some time on your blog, but carve out a bigger chunk of the time you kept for your blog, to try and create the reader base by marketing your contents in blogging forums (by this, we don’t mean that you should go on spamming threads in such forums, which will eventually mean you being kicked out of there, and will be useless), which will go a long way in getting you readers. Once you have a small reader base, your blog is getting regular visitors, and they are spending some time on your blog, you can try increasing the posting frequency on your blog.

Whatever be your posting frequency, CONSISTENCY IS THE KEY! You need to ensure that you have a fixed posting schedule that you try and follow religiously. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should make posting on your blog a daily chore, but then you certainly need to have a certain kind of posting schedule. For most bloggers and blogging niches, it is upon the blogger to ponder over and decide a posting frequency that would suit their conditions best. As a general heads up for anyone looking for a posting schedule for a majority of blogs, especially, when you are a new blogger, and don’t have too much exposure in the niche you are blogging in, we would suggest keeping a weekly schedule, that ensures that your blog has a new blogpost on a fixed day of the week, every week, month after month. Once you are settled down properly in this posting frequency and your blog is doing good, you are getting enough visitors to justify working on the blog more, you can rethink the posting schedule and increase it gradually such that you are comfortable with it, and your blog does good. Like for this blog too, we are keeping a bi-monthly schedule what we decided keeping in mind the exposure of this blog in the niche, and we plan to gradually increase the posting frequency over time, to keep the increasing expectations of our blog readers, as we grow over time, an our reader base increases.

In the end, we would like to suggest that it is mostly upon you to try and decide the posting schedule that you can manage without much effort, and ensure that you follow the schedule strictly. For a headstart, you can take a posting schedule that makes you post one blogpost, each week, making atleast 4 posts in every month. With this, we’d be closing this post, wishing you ALL THE BEST!

Get yourself a free web hosting

Last couple of posts saw some functionality additions, targeted at creating a better experience for your blog visitors, in a few instances adding eye candy to your blog. A lot of these functionalities needed you to host some of the required files somewhere so that the functionalities could work properly. What we needed was a web hosting account that lets you put up those required files online, for that eye candy menu to work properly. Now the you are required to pay up a good amount to get youtself a web hosting account, even a decent one. The problem is, when you opt for a blogger blog, you are not really required to have a hosting account, as your blog is already hosted on Google’s servers, doing away the work for you. Now buying a web hosting account just to put up some files online, coughing up money to be able to do that becomes really un-realistic in a real life scenario.

Again, not every blogger would be interested in really spending money just to host a few files. This is quite understandable in a lot of cases, more likely when you are a newbie blogger, or someone who just doesn’t earn anything to put back some money to run the blog. These are among a number of reasons bloggers tend to drop their plans to make such changes to their blogs. It is really unaffordable and unnecessary when you need a hosting account to host just a couple of files. So, we decided to do a small post just to help you go ahead with your plans of making changes in your blogger blog, changes that require you host external files to make the functionalities work properly on your blog, without burning a hole in your pocket, and we promise, your pocket and you, will absolutely love it.

There are a number of services that offer you free web hosting accounts, mostly offering LAMP (LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL PHP) configuration on a shared web server, that promises you a great minimum uptime of upto 99%. What more can one ask for, without paying a dime? One such service is provided by 000webhost.com. Looking at the offerings, 1500MB of disk space, 100GB of bandwidth, monthly, 5 email addresses, 5 sub domains and 2 MySQL databases are more than enough to get your blog’s new features up and running, for free!

Shown below is a screengrab of 000webhost’s website that lists the features of both, the paid and free account, and as you will find out, the free hosting account is more than enough your the kind of needs you will have with a web host.

000webhost Free Web Hosting

Further in this post, we take you on a tour through free 000webhost account, showing you how to create accounts, and showing you the cPanel hosting control panel that is provided free of cost with your free 000webhost account.

Account Creation

The above screenshot shows how to create a new hosting account once you sign up with 000webhost. You get options to create account for both, a custom domain that you registered for yourself, or a free sub domain that 000webhost offers you, again free of cost. Creating an account with a free subdomain is a great idea if you just need a hosting account to put up external script files and stylesheets for your blog’s new functionalities. You can get this done free of cost. The below screenshot shows you a confirmation of your new hosting account, you just created.

000webhost Hosting Account Created

Once your hosting account is created, you can come back to your account’s home. Now it displays the account you just created, along with it, the options to go to the cPanel Hosting Control Panel, 000webhost provides you, or the free Website Builder, that helps you build some good websites, pretty quickly, using some free to use website templates you can choose from the template library.

000webhost Account Home

If you want to manage your hosting account, you can just go to your cPanel Control Panel, shown below.

000webhost Hosting Account Control panel

This hosting control panel lets you manage your newly set up hosting account, add databases, email ID’s, sub domains, or just uploading the files on the web server. The control panel also displays some key stats for your blog which let you monitor the statistics of your hosting account/hosting server. Using 000webhost’s free web hosting account, you can easily get a good web hosting account to host the required files for your blogger blog’s customizations, or even create a new blog using wordpress, or any other CMS of your choice, which can run over Linux, and uses PHP/MySQL, or even a small website.

We hope that after this post, customizations in some of our previous posts will now be pretty easy to implement in your blogger blog.